MAPC Releases “Greening Our Grid” Report

BOSTON—The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) today announced the release of “Greening Our Grid,” a case study and fact sheet detailing MAPC’s efforts to use municipal electricity aggregation to help increase renewable energy in New England.

Municipal aggregation allows cities and towns to contract directly with an electricity supplier on behalf of residents and businesses as a way of negotiating better cost savings and ensuring more stable pricing. Savings are achieved by combining large-scale buying power with the ability to contract when prices are low. MAPC’s innovative new program with cities and towns combines the traditional benefits of aggregation with a strategy that both increases the portion of electricity supplied by local renewable energy sources and leads to more renewables coming online in New England.

The report highlights MAPC’s work with the city of Melrose, which recently completed its first year piloting this exciting strategy. In Melrose, residents and businesses joined together to purchase their electricity, saving a total of $200,000 across the community compared to basic service. The program automatically enrolled all basic service customers in “Melrose Local Green,” unless they opted out; 99 percent of households chose to stay in the Local Green option, which includes 5% more local, renewable energy. The additional renewable energy purchased by Melrose added the equivalent of one new wind turbine to the New England electric grid.

Arlington, Brookline, Gloucester, Hamilton, Millis, Somerville, Sudbury, and Winchester are poised to roll out their green aggregations next, working in partnership with MAPC this year.

For more information on the program or other clean energy initiatives at MAPC, contact the team at cleanenergy@mapc.org.

MAPC is the regional planning agency serving the people who live and work in Greater Boston.

Updated on Tue, 05/16/2017 – 11:54am

MAPC

Promoting Smart Growth & Regional Planning

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) is the regional planning agency serving the people who live and work in the 101 cities and towns of Metropolitan Boston. Our mission is to promote smart growth and regional collaboration. Our regional plan, MetroFuture, guides our work as we engage the public in responsible stewardship of our region’s future.